You walk down the road and mistake a flash in a dark corner as a knife and walk into the road to be run over by a car.

Or you see the flash and do not mistake it for a knife and carry on walking.

Are those 2 classes of thought ("wrong" and ""corrrct") or is that just a post factum categorization ?

Is there any way ,even in theory by examining the physical structure of the brain and body that it could be possible to gauge whether or not the physicality of a thought lies in either category?

Or is this just a question that can be asked but never answered other than to examine the consequences that flowed ? (and even then different observers will have different interpretations -if the person in the scenario was on their way to commit mass murder for example)

Edited October 28Oct 28 by geordief

21 minutes ago, geordief said:

You walk down the road and mistake a flash in a dark corner as a knife and walk into the road to be run over by a car.

Or you see the flash and do not mistake it for a knife and carry on walking.

Are those 2 classes of thought ("wrong" and ""corrrct") or is that just a post factum categorization ?

Is there any way ,even in theory by examining the physical structure of the brain and body that it could be possible to gauge whether or not the physicality of a thought lies in either category?

Or is this just a question that can be asked but never answered other than to examine the consequences that flowed ? (and even then different observers will have different interpretations -if the person in the scenario was on their way to commit mass murder for example)

Interesting subject geordief. +1

Is your question asking about the misinterpretation of the flash of light or something else ?

There was a most interesting discussion, with plenty of examples, in Stafford Beer's book in the late 1960s of such situations.

Unfortunately my copy got lost in one of my many moves and I can't trace it on Wikipedia (he has written quite a few books).

This is sad, not only because it contained lots of cogent thinking, but because his books are now fetching hundreds of £s S/H.

The book I am thinking of I'm pretty sure was a Pergammon publication.

Edited October 28Oct 28 by studiot

31 minutes ago, geordief said:

You walk down the road and mistake a flash in a dark corner as a knife and walk into the road to be run over by a car.

Or you see the flash and do not mistake it for a knife and carry on walking.

What if the flash you see in the second scenario turns out to be a real knife, and you get stabbed.
Maybe both are wrong, and you shouldn't have been walking in that part of town to begin with.

The accuracy of 'second guessing' in 'what if' scenarios is misleading.

15 minutes ago, studiot said:

Interesting subject geordief. +1

Is your question asking about the misinterpretation of the flash of light or something else ?

There was a most interesting discussion, with plenty of examples, in Stafford Beer's book in the late 1960s of such situations.

Unfortunately my copy got lost in one of my many moves and I can't trace it on Wikipedia (he has written quite a few books).

This is sad, not only because it contained lots of cogent thinking, but because his books are now fetching hundreds of £s S/H.

The book I am thinking of I'm pretty sure was a Pergammon publication.

I don't remember the thought that made me wonder this but it is the physicality of the situation that interested me.

When the mind makes a "mistake" is there some kind of a mechanism that "misfires" and that vould ,in throry be shown to have so done?

To my regret ,I was once asked ,in the interview to a university philosophy course what woild qualify as a wrong action and I replied that it depended on what the actor thought themselves (ie some kind of moral relativism)

The follow up question was "Was Hitler right?" and I answered yes(obviously i disagreed with him but thought that he may have been "right on his own terms"

Looking back,I was trying to impress in the interview -and I think I succeeded .I suspect some of them may have thought i did not go far enough.

As regards the OP it seems to me that the "mechanism" that might ensure a "correct" perception just does not exist and I wonder if any consequences might flow from that.

After all it seems to me that one of the main aims of a good life should be to correctly perceive the world /to look the world in the face and this might seem to undercut that effort.

20 minutes ago, MigL said:

What if the flash you see in the second scenario turns out to be a real knife, and you get stabbed.
Maybe both are wrong, and you shouldn't have been walking in that part of town to begin with.

The accuracy of 'second guessing' in 'what if' scenarios is misleading.

There is the third option of "I don't know" but do we only have that thought after the perception whilst our "instant" thought is to jump to one conclusion over the other

Do we always "second guess" in practice?

Is sometimes "second guessing" all we do and do our instant perceptions just take place in our subconcious mind?

Edited October 28Oct 28 by geordief

17 minutes ago, geordief said:

When the mind makes a "mistake" is there some kind of a mechanism that "misfires" and that vould ,in throry be shown to have so done?

Some time in the mid-sixties, my mother visited a woman in a neighbouring village, taking me along with her. For a while, I was left alone sitting in this exquisitely decorated sitting room too scared to move for fear of knocking over some precious ornament or other. So I just sat there listening to the ticking of an expensive looking carriage clock that had pride of place on the mantlepiece.

I began counting the ticks.

For some reason, that experience embedded itself so deeply in my memory that I can recall it at will. And I do, even now sixty years on whenever I need to time some activity.

Shortly, I'll be making some rotis. They need 40 seconds each side in a dry pan on a medium high gas flame.

I'll just put myself back in that room and count the ticking of that carriage clock.

Am I really a six or seven year- old boy in some suburban bungalow in Copmanthorpe or wherever it was? No, of course not. It's just a figment of my imagination rekindled by circumstance and amplified by emotional association and habit.

Is it 'right' or 'wrong'?

Wrong question. It just works for me.

Edited October 28Oct 28 by sethoflagos
sp

3 hours ago, geordief said:

When the mind makes a "mistake" is there some kind of a mechanism that "misfires" and that vould ,in throry be shown to have so done?

I know that this is in the philosophy section, but it sounds more like you are talking about pattern recognition in the brain. And fundamentally it is constructive process, in a way it tries to create an output based on sensory inputs, but also what is present in memory as well as the current state of mind.

If afraid, for example cues are more likely to be interpreted as dangerous, for example. But there is no right or wrong at that point as only in hindsight (which means following a corrective pattern matching process) can the brain figure out whether something was identified rightly or wrongly.

The interview situation seems to be rather different to the scenario outlined in OP, though (and is more philosophical in nature).

4 hours ago, geordief said:

Is there any way ,even in theory by examining the physical structure of the brain and body that it could be possible to gauge whether or not the physicality of a thought lies in either category?

This seems to get into the NCC, the neural correlates of consciousness, area. We can certainly monitor the physical brain and make general observations, e.g. the scanner shows a lot of temporal lobe activity, or the EEG shows a dominant alpha rhythm, but we don't seem to be able to identify a particular thought, let alone whether it's a thought aligned with reality or logical propositions about what's happening. We can make inferences like, "okay, we showed you a picture of some pecan pie with ice cream and there was a flurry of activation in your hypothalamus, therefore it's likely you felt some desire for a dessert like that," but this is only inference on what seems probable and it is quite possible I instead happened to think about being trapped in an elevator with a young Claudia Cardinale, and it was so hot we both had to start removing our garments to survive - this thought process could show similar levels of hypothalamic activation which had little to do with pie.

I think one could do better with very simple responses which are "correct," say in terms of responding in a driving simulator. For example, a poor reaction to an obstacle (freaking out and driving up over the curb and mowing down a pedestrian) might show up as excessive activation in the limbic system and amygdala but without a useful elevation of activity in the frontal lobe (tactic for avoidance), motor cortex (implementing the maneuvers), and occipital cortex (visual processing). So at the level where "correct" just means adaptive to a situation, one could identify more adapative patterns of activity. But we still wouldn't know, beyond out common sense understanding of situations, the precise thoughts. Each brain has a unique connectome, the term for the synaptic wiring, so the pattern of a specific complex thought would be different in each brain.

When the mind makes a "mistake" is there some kind of a mechanism that "misfires" and that could ,in theory be shown to have so done?

The concept of a mistake is so broad a spectrum of things. There are neurological conditions that lead to delusions, mistakes of perception and interpretation (like Oliver Sachs stuff, the man who mistook his wife for a hat) and which have physical markers like lesions in the brain. And there are stress conditions that make careful rational thought quite difficult and impair judgement. Also booze and drugs. But then there are a lot of errors that are just neurologically healthy people with bad information and educational deficits, or reasoning impaired by intense emotion, followed by hasty and bad responses to things. Or there is even malice, where logic and facts are deliberately distorted in order to exact revenge on others or act out cruel judgments or pass on some emotional trauma. Again, these don't require some physical abnormality, they're things that humans are prone to when they lack sufficient nurture and guidance.