What are some critiques of Plato's Theory of Forms?

we can and do often construct meta-categories, otherwise we wouldn't have very robust or abstract thought. i don't see why we can't just make a "chairness" meta-category/feature and have a constellation of objects/features that are immediately connected to it. this would be in line with how modern neuroscience understands the brain re: connectionist networks

Plato was discoursing on his theory of forms and, pointing to the cups on the table before him, said while there are many cups in the world, there is only one `form' of a cup, and this cupness precedes the existence of all particular cups.

"I can see the cup on the table," interrupted Diogenes, "but I can't see the "cupness"".

"That's because you have the eyes to see the cup," said Plato, "but", tapping his head with his forefinger, "you don't have the intellect with which to comprehend "cupness"" Diogenes walked up to the table, examined a cup and, looking inside, asked,

"Is it empty?" Plato nodded. "Where is the "emptiness" which precedes this empty cup?" asked Diogenes. Plato allowed himself a few moments to collect his thoughts, but Diogenes reached over and, tapping Plato's head with his finger, said "I think you will find here is the "emptiness""

PLATONISTS ON SUICIDE WATCH

>but Diogenes reached over and, tapping Plato's head with his finger, said "I think you will find here is the "emptiness""

do you think this was an insult or was diogenes on that pyrrhic skepticism before pyrrho was?

There isn't really a single discrete networks, unless you count all of your nervous systems. What you do see are some general activation patterns that are more related to some areas of the brain than others. But you don't have a "chair" network - there isn't a single network for every single category.

An image of a chair can easily brought to consciousness by a stimulii that an independent observer wouldn't relate to chair.

You see a chair and you experience something similar to other past exposures to chairs. But you might also experience drooling because every time you saw a chair before you ate a delicious cheeseburger. Different stimulii might activate similar networks but so will different stimulii that are paired together: if the first case was evidence of form ("chairness") why not the second ("chair-cheesburger-ness")?

Truth is: most discourse is made up of something like "lies-to-children", oversimplifications. Not everything fits within clear borders, but it makes stuff easier to understand. Trouble starts when you start to reify those abstractions.

That should be "stimulus". Sorry, but English isn't my first language. In my mother tongue we don't have to awkwardly pull in Latin, we have different words ("estímulo(s)").

KEK

Pyrrho probably formalized the aspects, but generic skepticism should be norm in the human realm.

this sounds an awful lot like behaviourism

if a pattern of activation has a limited number of nodes then that pattern of activation can be said to be discrete. the nodes might be multi-purpose and used in other patterns of activation, but that does not preclude us the ability to give different patterns of activation different names.

there are of course fuzzy boundaries between categories and patterns of activation. for example one might have a very loose definition of chair, conflating it with sofas. their pattern of activation would be much broader when considering chairness, but when asked to consider the unique aspects of a sofa this pattern of activation might be momentarily pruned somewhat. if the distinction keeps cropping up the pruning will stick and the pattern will be effectively separated. i suspect that this is how most learning works.

Well, behaviorism studies the outward expression of an organism's process of Hebbian learning. The notion that "neurons that fire together wire together" offers the physiological analog for behavioral conditioning.

>if a pattern of activation has a limited number of nodes then that pattern of activation can be said to be discrete.
The thing is that there isn't the limit can "float". Imaging techniques don't show us actual nets, they light up areas which have a greater probability of being more activated at a given time. Like, your default neural network (that's an actual thing) lights up when you are farting around not really focusing on anything. It doesn't correspond to a specific set of neurons.

I'm assuming we are treating specific neurons or clusters of neurons as the "nodes". If we were referring to major brain areas as the nodes in this network that gets even fuzzier because those are always firing, even if relatively less.

We don't find neural networks by looking for "is/is not", but by looking for "is more/is less" - talking about the activation of different areas or the brain.

>The thing is that there isn't the limit can "float".
fuck

The thing is that there isn't a clear limit, it can "float".

yes but Hebbian learning and behaviourism are terribly outdated. neurons that fire together wire together was always a nice catch phrase but it's not as simple as that because frequency of firing modulates what is wired and what is not. neurons also have different "weights" determined by genetic processes in addition to frequency and association effects. there are many processes determining patterns of activation in neural networks and we aren't nearly close to uncovering all of them.

categories do exist though, and that is easily evident in language, which must be realized in these neural networks. the language faculty owes itself to our ability to categorize. it allows us to package different patterns of activation into concepts and words. or "forms" if you will.

now i think plato's idea of forms is wrong, but only because he was limited to a very primitive understanding of the world. he definitely grasped a revolutionary idea, he just didn't know that literally everything he was experiencing was realized in his brain (which he probably thought was a cooling vent of some kind)

i come at these things from a neurolinguistic background so i'm not really in the know about how neural networks are understood from say a motor perspective. but there has been fruitful research in the past 15 or so years on brain imaging of linguistic/semantic structures and there does seem to be unique patterns of activation when one is shown different words and images.

of course there's one large neural network, but it is not just one neural network. the different regions of the brain certainly have relatively closed networks by virtue of specialization. they might share certain information with other parts of the brain but they are certainly mappable and thus can be categorized.

physicists don't say "we can't define a quark, it's just part of an atom" likewise neuroscientists shouldn't say "we can't define concepts, they're part of a neural network"

future of cognitive neuroscience is in isolating patterns of activation within the many neural networks

I started writing a bunch of stuff here, but I'm not a teacher and I don't think I can make a truly cohesive argument: I'm gonna just keep getting more expansive the longer this goes on. I'll try to present my position simply.

I'm biased against Plato, but I'd say his notion of forms is pretty far from our notion of concepts.

Concepts could maybe translate into some neural clusters, but they must be thought of as integrated in the whole circuit - a single ugly blow to Wernicke's area could make it so you couldn't understand language, but you'd still be able to use tools just as well as before. Logical thought becomes impossible (though semantics remains mostly unscathed). Can we say this person lost the concept of chair? Maybe, but he still seems to know what a chair is, in that he uses it appropriately even when he is presented to a new chair. So, I'd say if there is something like concepts, yes, even something like proto-concepts (no language involved) in some animals and those guys that only speak semantically perfect nonsense.

But no neuroscientist is pinning down specific concepts in specific areas of the brain, they which areas are more related to concept formation, understanding of language, etc. There is no evidence of one "chair network".

To use your analogy, quarks might be discrete objects in the way that neurons or even major networks are, but concepts would be something much more blurry, like electron clouds rather than the electrons themselves.

>they which areas
fuck again

they pin which areas